Near-IR speckle imaging of massive young stellar objects^*

¹ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
² Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Postbus 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
³ Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: alvarez@mpia-hd.mpg.de
⁴ European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschildstr. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany

Received: 2 October 2003
Accepted: 17 June 2004

Abstract

We present near-IR speckle images of 21 massive Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) associated with outflows. The aim of this study is to search for sub-arcsecond reflection nebulae associated with the outflow cavity. We find that 6 of the massive YSOs show a conical nebula which can be interpreted in terms of reflected light from the dusty walls of the outflow cavity. In all cases, the small scale structures seen in our images are compared with outflow indicators found in the literature. No clear correlation is found between the presence of the reflection nebulosity and any property such as degree of embeddedness. We also note that 3 of the sources show close companions, one of them belonging also to the sample with conical nebula.